Lucy Jerram

And the owner had gone and they'd cut down the ash trees in their garden and the dog's allergy hadn't gone any better because, of course, the neighbour had an ash tree still.

So we look at... For those, we look at... Historically, we gave them antihistamines and steroids, things that we would know ourselves, but they come with quite a lot of side effects.

So more recently, newer products have been...

researched and brought to the market so things like they're called monoclonal antibodies that you can inject and essentially they they stop the the effects of the allergy on the dog but in a much more specific way so hopefully fewer side effects there okay so science is a bit like human medicine science is moving on and if a dog has allergies is it likely to get other conditions as well on top of that yeah so if the allergies are left unchecked

then the dog will scratch and itch and potentially lick.

And that can then lead to kind of a vicious cycle of yeasts, bacteria, that kind of thing kicking in.

And at that stage, we often don't see the dogs in the early stages.

We see them at the stage of there being an actual skin infection there as well.

So we have to clear that up first and then go back to looking at what might have caused the issues initially.

Yes.

So I guess we would see it most commonly in dogs.

But we would see cats in particular can be allergic to the fleas that they might carry.

But even things like rabbits and guinea pigs can have issues.

That sounds painful.

And the ears, we actually didn't touch them on the ears there, but ears are an extension of the skin.

So this might actually suggest that this dog potentially has an allergy elsewhere and it's just demonstrating itself in the ears.

Totally, steroids is a reasonable first stage for something like that.

But when you're getting kind of repeat problems... You can't be on steroids all the time.

Yeah, exactly.

And the yeast can be an overgrowth of...